What you are stating is a truism. The unspoken assumption you are responding to is that there is a shortage at the wage they are willing to offer. However you

What you are stating is a truism. The unspoken assumption you are responding to is that there is a shortage at the wage they are willing to offer. However you are replacing it with an assumption that wages should go up until sufficient positions are lost through attrition by being too expensive to fill. I don't think this is a very useful hair to split because it doesn't tell us much about what dynamics are actually going on. As someone with a lot of experience on both sides of the tech company hiring equation, and I think there are two main issues. First is notorious difficulty of quantifying tech skills. It's worse than a market for lemons, because even the potential hire themselves is prone to misestimate their own skillset. Second, tech skills aren't really fungible. Yes, we often talk about how a skilled engineer can easily pick up a new language, but it's not just languages, it's also problem domains, and work environments which vary widely and can greatly impact the utility of a given person. With job tenures being so short these days, it's difficult to invest a lot in training someone when you fear they will leave in a year and you'll be back to square one. I might be willing to raise the salary dramatically for the perfect candidate (who may not even exist), but I can't compete with Google and Facebook for the undeveloped talent because my company just doesn't have the cash flow.